Re: GNUstep Web browser (was Re: WebKit Bounty)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 3 Mar 2007, at 22:58, Riccardo wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Friday, March 2, 2007, at 09:29 PM, hns@computer.org wrote:
>
> > I think it is worth to mention SimpleWebKit here - a rough
> > implementation of
> > WebView, WebFrame, WebFrameView, WebDataSource etc. - completely
> > written
> > in Objective-C without any C++. The reason is that it must cross-
> > compile
> > on gcc 2.95.3 for some ARM processors.
>
> I think it is a pretty good idea. If done well it should end up in  
> a cleaner implementation than apple's and also more manageable. Of  
> course it will never reach the completeness of WebKit, since even  
> WebKit pales compared to Gecko. But it could end up being more  
> portable, more efficient and what is good even a good option since  
> you say ti is a reimplementation. As I read it, one browser could  
> use one or the other without big effort.
> It could be used in a light-browser as well as in applications were  
> an embedded HTML/XHTML engine is needed.
>
> Of course it should en handling real-world pages decently, but  
> before worrying of that (links does it and even dillo improved a  
> little) it should display correct pages correctly. The rest is  
> added "burden" actually.
>
> Would you consider signing FSF and making it LGPL available in  
> gnustep?

I think that would be good ... not because I'm saying that this  
*should* be the approach taken, but because I think there is room for  
more than one approach.  In my estimation a port of WebKit is likely  
to yield a 'complete' (ie usable across a very wide range of web  
pages) solution more quickly, but the re-implementation approach will  
probably produce something which can be used for viewing  
documentation and other automatically generated (relatively bug-free)  
pages quickly.

I guess the re-implementation approach won't meet the conditions of  
the bounty, but on the other hand it's probably a lot more fun to code.

Anyway, while I'm very much against duplication of effort generally,  
that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try two approaches in parallel if  
people are interested in doing both.  Free software is largely about  
people have fun doing what they want to do.